Exactly What Is This?

'La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images' (1929). The inscription reads: 'This is not a pipe.'
Los Angeles County Museum Art

By

Richard B. Woodward

Sept. 30, 2013 3:59 p.m. ET

Magritte: The Mystery Of the Ordinary, 1926-1938 The Museum of Modern Art Through Jan. 12

New York

For anyone tempted to experience the mind-bending distortions of 20th-century art,
René Magritte
is a gateway drug. Since the 1960s, generations of curious teenagers bored by their lives have entered museums or libraries under his spell, having somewhere encountered one of his droll pictorial riddles (is the view outside that window a landscape or just another painting?) and stock characters (men in dark overcoats and bowler hats falling like raindrops from a cloudless sky).

His heady images are by now as comforting as
Salvador Dalí's
melted watches or
Giorgio de Chirico's
shadow-struck piazzas and, as such, exemplify an unintended result of Surrealism, the subversive art and literary movement founded by
André Breton
in 1924: Revolutionaries who set out to undermine bourgeois orthodoxy can become its epitome.

Walking through the Museum of Modern Art's "Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary 1926-1938," some visitors may find the chief revelation comes not so much from sharing space with "Les Amants (The Lovers)" (1928), "La Durée poignardée (Time Transfixed)" (1938) and other Surrealist icons, but rather from the easily forgettable fact that before they were dorm-room posters and museum-shop postcards, these works existed as oil paintings. So seamless are his illusions that they seem to have been created unbidden from dreams, without calculation or the movement of a man's hand.

This traveling show examines a dozen of Magritte's early and most productive years. Organized by curators at MoMA (Anne Umland, assisted by Danielle Johnson), the Art Institute of Chicago (
Stephanie D'Allesandro
) and the Menil Collection (
Clare Elliott
), it begins when the artist was a 28-year-old unknown in Brussels and ends when the artist was asked to deliver an autobiographical lecture in Anvers, Belgium, on his career as a notable Surrealist.

These were years when he developed many of the motifs that, in various combinations, came to define his work: sleigh bells, cerulean skies, clouds, mirrors, theater curtains, picture frames, birds and bird cages, lions, trees, pipes, eyeballs, cannons, female nudes, and men in suits and bowler hats. (Not in his repertoire of dream imagery until later: apples, angels, street lamps, umbrellas, stone tableaus, floating boulders, mountain aeries.)

Like all expert magicians, Magritte did his best to hide the fact that what he did required effort or practice. It is disappointing, therefore, that the show devotes so little space to process and technique. Most of the 80 objects are finished paintings. Only in a corner of the first room, where a small group of his collages from 1926-27 are tucked away, can we see him stumbling to perfect his act.

His bonds with commercial art are oddly underplayed. One has to read the informative catalog essays, edited by Ms. Umland, to learn about the ups and downs of his friendship with Breton and the Surrealists. Magritte moved from Brussels in 1927 to the suburbs of Paris. But by 1930 he was back in Brussels, having failed to impress the French critics or public. For much of the period in the show he supported himself and his wife, Georgette, as a graphic artist—a fitting start in that his images have profoundly influenced 20th-century advertising.

With their smooth finish, clearly outlined figures and bizarre scenarios, Magritte's canvases have their strongest affinities with the history of avant-garde illustration and photo-collage. The brushed possibilities of paint-as-paint didn't interest him. Happy to ignore applied- and fine-art boundaries, he didn't much care late in life whether people knew his pictures by seeing originals or reproductions.

Despite the absence here of other artists and cultural phenomena inspired by Magritte, it's impossible not to feel their presence. These were years when he began to reconsider the standard relationship between things and their verbal or visual description. These connections were arbitrary in his mind—or, as he famously put it: "an object is not so possessed by its name that one cannot find for it another which suits it better."

About a dozen of these text-and-image paintings, as well as one sculpture, are at the center of the show. The classic "La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images)," featuring a picture of a pipe along with a written contradiction of that fact ("This is not a pipe"), dates from 1929. An even funnier—and later (1936-37)—twist on picture and title can be found in "Ceci est un morceau de fromage (This is a Piece of Cheese)," which consists of a framed painting of a cheese slice that has been placed on a real glass plate and covered by a real glass dome.

In both cases what appears to be obvious is not. The gap between an actual object and its representation is wider than anyone might think. Words are evocative things in their own right, these paintings claim, but their independence makes them as slippery as they are necessary.

Marcel Duchamp is generally credited as the father of Conceptual art. But artists as different as
Saul Steinberg
and
Jasper Johns,
Robert Barry
and
John Baldessari,
and postmodern theorist
Michel Foucault,
have also looked back to Magritte. His painted subjects broken into separate frames—a female nude in "L'evidence éternelle (The Eternally Obvious)," a cloud landscape in "Les Perfections célestes (Celestial Perfections)," both from 1930—have been no less important for those trying to destabilize conventions of seeing and displaying art.

Beyond the art world, numberless New Yorker cartoons,
Stephen Wright
jokes ("How do you tell when you're out of invisible ink?") and
Billy Collins
poems can be traced back to works in this show. "La Représentation (Representation)" (1937), a picture of a woman's midsection in which the frame follows the curve of her hips, should be accompanied by a drummer's rim shot.

Magritte's love for popular cinema has been reciprocated in Hollywood science-fiction movies. The transformation of human flesh that takes place in many of the paintings here—arms into tree bark in "Découverte (Discovery)" (1927), feet into shoe leather in "Le Modèle rouge (The Red Model)" (1935)—are not unlike special effects found in "The Terminator" and "X-Men" series.

It's frustrating that the installation does so little to identify the analytic thinking behind Magritte's absurdist tricks. A breakdown along Freudian lines might have better exposed how he went about tapping into our dream-state anxieties. (It's telling, for example, that he loved puns but seldom fell back, until later in his career, on that cheap stand-by: wild exaggerations of scale.)

With an artist so thoroughly absorbed by the world outside museums, there is a temptation for art critics or curators to elevate previously undervalued (or despised) bodies of work back to legitimacy. This happened in the 1970s with the once-ridiculed late paintings of De Chirico and has occurred in recent years with Magritte. His so-called Periode vache (Cow Period), in 1947-48, when he suddenly painted in an erratic rather than a uniform style, and in garish rather than somber colors, is often invoked by curators tracing the history of deliberately "bad" art.

MoMA and its fellow institutions have wisely stayed away from mounting a trendy exhibition. This scholarly chronology of greatest hits by one of art's comic geniuses offers plenty to smile at. I just wish the material on the walls had taken us deeper inside the trouble-making mind of this proper Belgian, a Surrealist who for more than 25 years painted at his easel in a corner of his apartment's tiny living room, dressed in a three-piece suit.

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